…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

The Best Teacher Resources For “TED Talks” (& Similar Presentations)

I’ve written several posts recently about TED Talks, and thought I’d pull together a short list of resources that would be helpful to other teachers (and me) as we consider how to use them most effectively in our classes.

I’m going to start off with a quote from their website explaining what these “things” are:

“TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

site makes the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 400 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks feature closed captions in English, and many feature subtitles in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely and reposted.”

Links to a Google doc that lists all of the Ted Talks, including links and descriptions, has been circulating on Twitter for weeks. It’s not clear, though, who created such a helpful document. If it was you, let me know!

Pop! Tech looks very similar to TED Talks. It brings in “big thinkers” to give short presentations.
The major drawback, however, is that, unlike TED Talks, Pop! Tech uses Vimeo to host their videos, which means that most school content filters will block access. There are certainly ways to use them in schools, but it will take more work than the TED Talks, which host their videos on their own site and is usually unblocked. It definitely does have some great stuff, though, and is worth a periodic visit.

Ignite are a series of talks, available online, that are somewhat similar to TED Talks. Presenters get 20 slides and five minutes to make their point. It’s somewhat similar to Pecha Kucha presentations. The topics don’t appear to generally be as wide-ranging as TED Talks, and seem to be more “geeky,” but some look pretty interesting.

Big Think has over 600 engaging interviews with “thought leaders.” In many ways, it’s similar to TED Talks. One nice advantage is that they host the talks on their site, so it should get through school content filters.

PostRank, which uses an “engagement index” to measure the popularity of web content, has done an interesting analysis of all TED Talks.

In addition, Sebastian Wernicke, the speaker in that talk, has created a fun online application called tedPAD. Using the data he has compiled, you have the option of creating your own tongue-in-cheek “phenomenal” or “really bad” TED Talks.

Years ago I went to a couple of conferences that had incredibly talented people “take notes” about what was happening at the conference. They did it by rapidly drawing/summarizing the important points on huge pieces of paper taped on the wall. I found it quite mesmerizing, and would often just watch what they were doing instead of who was speaking (in the same way that I sometimes just watch the amazing interpreters for the deaf at entertainment events).

I was able to find some absolutely amazing video examples of method that made some academic talks incredibly accessible, including one from Daniel Pink talking about his book, Drive. I’ve written a lot about Pink and his research on motivation.

FORA.tv has quite a collection of video-recorded talks from “big-thinkers.”

ESL TED Talks is a blog created by Douglas Evans that has lessons he’s created for English Language Learners using TED Talks. He’s clearly put a lot of work into them, and they could be very useful. They focus almost entirely on comprehension, so a teacher would definitely want to supplement them with strategies to stimulate discussion on the topics of the Talks themselves, and how students could content the content to their own lives. Thanks to Sam Malone for the tip.

ideaCity, also known as ‘Canada’s Premiere Meeting of the Minds’, is an eclectic gathering of artists, adventurers, authors, cosmologists, doctors, designers, entertainers, filmmakers, inventors, magicians, musicians, scientists and technologists. Fifty of the planet’s brightest minds converge on Toronto each June to speak to a highly engaged audience.

Here are two other TED-like sites:

The GEL Conference describes itself way: “Short for “Good Experience Live”, Gel is a conference and community exploring good experience in all its forms – in art, business, technology, society, and life.” They have a nice collection of video presentations from their conferences.

99 Percent says about itself: “The annual 99% Conference, held each Spring, brings together 400+ creative thinkers and doers for two days to hear talks from creative luminaries and exchange best practices on making ideas happen.”

TED Talks, the famous site/meeting that invites notable thinkers and doers to speak and then their talks online, has just created a new feature called TED Conversations. You can read more about how they describe it here. In many ways, it’s just another social network that it appears like every organization is starting these days. However, the key difference is that it appears that at least some TED speakers are participating in the conversations. If that continues on a serious level, then TED Conversations is going to become very popular, very quickly, and be very useful.

“What are some must-see TED talks?” was a question raised at Quora. It includes the vote total based on responses, as well as a tabulation of likes and dislikes on YouTube. The results are intriguing.

The University of Cambridge organizes an on-going series of short presentations called “Cambridge Ideas,” which seem to be very similar to TED Talks. They have their collection both on YouTube and on their own University website.

“60 Second Lectures” are pretty neat…60 second lectures offered annually by University of Pennsylvania faculty. The first link leads you to year’s presentations, and link will lead you to archive, where you can see the video and access a written transcript of lectures from previous years.

TED and The Huffington Post are launching a year-end collaboration around 18 groundbreaking ideas that premiered on TED.com in 2011 and may very well reshape the world in 2012. For 18 days, The Huffington Post will count down these big ideas from TED in a list curated by Chris Anderson, with essays from each speaker exploring the idea they came to TED (or a TEDx) to with the world.

Solve For X is a series of TED-like talks that appear to be sponsored by Google.

It’s described as “A forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork.”

Here’s a sample. It’s a talk by Nicholas Negroponte on students earning by themselves:

TED has begun a new searchable feature called TED Quotes. They highlight great quotes from their TED Talks, and they link back to the presentation.

TED Talks, the well-known resource of short and thought-provoking….talks has just announced that they will be starting a regular show on NPR called “TED Radio Hour.” It will be played on local stations, but will also be available on the NPR website. You can learn more about it here.

It offers up original video content that marries the talent of great teachers with top animators to bring concepts like neuroscience to life in in short videos, typically 5 minutes long….Through its open submission process, animators and educators from around the globe can contribute lesson plans and video reels on any topic…Select lesson submissions will be matched with chosen visualizers to create video lessons worth learning, watching, and .

Right now, it has four “playlists” — “Awesome Nature,” “How Things Work,” “Playing With Language,” and “Questions No One Knows (Yet) The Answer To.” Here are samples from each one:

Thanks to reader Terri Reh, I’ve learned about The TEDx Classroom Project. It’s an extremely impressive effort that includes students’ analysis of various TED Talks, along with students using the TED model to create their own presentations.

The Huffington Post has begun what they are calling “TED Weekends.” They’re choosing a TED video each weekend, getting some high-powered guests to write responses to it, and then inviting readers to contribute. You can read more about it here.

An inspiring way to learn English? By watching TED Talks is a post from the TED blog about a new textbook series, along with multimedia, designed to use TED materials to teach English. It’s very hard to get an idea of what it really looks like from this post, so I can’t make any comment about how good or bad it is. I’d be interested in getting feedback from people who have actually seen or used the materials.

I love the TED talks as well. While not a teacher, I would encourage people to look at the IGNITE series too. Held around the world, many of them available on video, 5 minute talks, 20 power point slides. Really amazing what you can learn in 5 minutes with a thoughtful and efficient approach. http://ignite.oreilly.com/

Thanks for pulling the ideas together Larry. I’m at that place in my life where I want to inspire my students to think bigger, live larger, as well as push myself to learn how to reach them in ways to which they can relate.

My Second Book On Student Motivation!

My Second Book On Teaching ELLs

My book, "The ESL/ELL Teacher's Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools, and Activities for Teaching English Language Learners of All Levels," (co-authored by Katie Hull Sypnieski) was published in the Summer of 2012